Nice. I experimented last weekend how many simple meshbuffers I can draw without instancing - I think with 40 fps on my system that was just around 10.000 objects (and not doing anything else and identical materials...).

Important:- All users should uninstall and reinstall, to get all the latest features !so we recommend that you UNINSTALL Build A World, and reinstall it.Get the installer from: http://www.buildaworld.net/download

New Features:- 4 new Tutorials- Menus have been reorganised, and settings have become more detailed.- Unlimited amount of vegetation, and other detailed blocks (demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbfZuTpFdYU )- TV block, which can show youtube movies. (demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FnNcnJWeTk )- Cash Register / Shop block (which connects to nearby containers, so users can buy whats in containers)- Item Exchange (which connects to nearby containers, so the game can buy items)- Soil dries over time (demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5axCbGkLWM ) if settings 'Water Evaporation' is set.- Dry grass will now burn- Overview map (hit 'O') now has a map overview- Minimap and overview map are now colored.- A number of 'Fences' have been added. (new constructions, search for 'fence')- A new faster Spring block

Tech:- Tons of tech things has changed 'under the hood'- General FPS is up by 30-100%- Direct State Access OpenGL used by default with workarounds just for Intel- Reverse Z-Buffer- New SIMD optimized raycast system- The graphics engine changed to a radical fork of Irrlicht 1.8.3- A number of linear algebra,vector math and scene graph optimizations- A number of things moved from CPU to GPU using Transform Feedback- High Performance Animation System and Hardware Skinning for mobs on all GPUs- Meshes are now instanced and GPU culled for maximum speed performance.- Client uses less memory.- Client uses multi-threaded OpenGL for asynchronous buffer streaming- Server now uses thread for compression (raknet)- Custom voxelization routines for importing GIS data

Known issues:- There is some stuttering due to waiting for GPU culling queries- Quick Select bar does not save.- currently the visual 3D cache is disabled (untill next update)- not all settings have effect yet.- no Tessellation Shaders for Radeon (use CPU tessellation instead)- Occlusion Culling disabled until a new implementation

Hidden in this release (ready for next)- a number of plants, for growing food- a number of teacher functions ( for the edu version)

have you tried to use the same culling tencnique used in Mobile version of minecraft instead of occlusion queries? (I'm stupidly assuming you use occlusion just for hiding geometries and not for other stuff).You do not have ravines (real earth has very few ravines, so that tecnique should be really usefull and since you are confindent with multithreading you can also improve it using a MT variant on the algorithm. I think that will give a definite boost and you could drop occlusion queries usage at all

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